NEW YORK (AP) Â— A 1974 New York state ban on nunchucks that was put into place over fears that youth inspired by martial arts movies would create widespread mayhem is unconstitutional under the Second Amendment, a federal court has ruled. Judge Pamela Chen issued her ruling Friday in a Brooklyn federal court on the martial arts weapon made famous by Bruce Lee. The plaintiff, James Maloney, started his legal quest after being charged with possession of nunchucks in his home in 2000. He initially filed a complaint in 2003, and appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court...

A children's speech pathologist who has worked for the last nine years with developmentally disabled, autistic, and speech-impaired elementary school students in Austin, Texas, has been told that she can no longer work with the public school district, after she refused to sign an oath vowing that she “does not” and “will not” engage in a boycott of Israel or “otherwise tak[e] any action that is intended to inflict economic harm” on that foreign nation. A lawsuit on her behalf was filed early Monday morning in a federal court in the Western District of Texas, alleging a violation of her...

The case is Texas, et al., v. United States of America, et al., Defendants, California, et al. Intervenors-Defendants. Case 4:18-cv-00167-O Here is the actual decision where Judge O'Conner, of the Northern District Court of Texas, has ruled that Obamacare is unconstitutional because the Supreme Court ruled it was only Constitutional because the individual mandate was a tax. That tax was removed by Congress during the first year of the Trump administration. From courtlistener.com: The United States healthcare system touches millions of lives in a daily and deeply personal way. Health-insurance policy is therefore a politically charged affair—inflaming emotions and...

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the biggest star in the Democratic Party, and she has been ever since she unseated Rep. Joe Crowley in a surprise primary upset in May. That her win didn’t, in the final analysis, launch a wave of leftist primary victories only goes to show what a phenomenon she personally is. Not everyone shares her brand of politics, of course, but her constituency has exploded beyond the initial set of ideologues who powered the challenge to Crowley because of her incredible wit, charisma, social media savvy, and basic political smarts. In a year when moderate incumbents generally didn’t...

Reflections on the anniversary of the first ratification convention’s conclusion… On December 7, 1787, at Elizabeth Battel's Golden Fleece Tavern in Dover, Delaware, the state of Delaware became the first state to ratify the new Constitution of the United States, and did so by a unanimous vote of thirty to zero. With such an auspicious beginning, we might think that national ratification would be a foregone conclusion, but ... no such luck. As easy a decision as it was for some states, it was a very difficult one for others. We think there are huge differences between the states today...

John Dingell knows a thing or two about how Congress works. First elected to the US House of Representatives at age 29 in a 1955 special election, Dingell left office in January 2015, nearly 60 years later. The last president he served with, Barack Obama, was born six years after Dingell entered office. His tenure was the longest in the history of the House or Senate, outlasting stalwarts like Strom Thurmond and Ted Kennedy by more than a decade. So his call to abolish the Senate, announced in an Atlantic excerpt from his new memoir, is pretty notable. He pairs...

Another day, another revelation as the great fleecing of the U.S. taxpayer continues unabated. Let’s begin at the beginning. Forty percent of Americans are now born out of wedlock. Single parent families are associated with a long list of social maladies: “Children who grow up with only one of their biological parents (nearly always the mother) are disadvantaged across a broad array of outcomes. . . . they are twice as likely to drop out of high school, 2.5 times as likely to become teen mothers, and 1.4 times as likely to be idle — out of school and out of work...

The Iowa State seal proclaims: We prize our liberties and our rights we will maintain. Iowa is in the process of doing exactly that by adding a constitutional amendment to protect the right to keep and bear arms (RKBA) at the state level. Iowa is one of only six states that lack some state constitutional protection for the RKBA. The proposed amendment is as follows: From iowa.gov: Right to acquire, keep, possess, transport, carry, transfer, and use arms. SEC. 1A. The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. The sovereign state of Iowa...

Over the next few squibs I will show why Scotus has no Constitutional business fabricating rights. As opposed to its assumed authority to invent rights, it is instead duty-bound to defend the Constitution. Like the rest of the Bill of Rights, the Ninth Amendment deserves equal protection from the Scotus. Despite this presumption, Scotus has generally interpreted the Ninth Amendment in a manner that denies the sovereign people’s prerogative to assert the rights that Scotus is Constitutionally bound to accept.1Background. Thanks to the assurances of James Madison and other Federalists, the draft Constitution made its way unscathed through a rough...

This week on The David Rubenstein Show, retired Justice Kennedy finally admitted the real reason behind his Obergefell ruling, the 2015 Supreme Court decision that created a novel definition of marriage to give legal status to same-sex couples. Kennedy said, “It seemed to me just wrong that under the Constitution, over 100,000 adopted children of gay parents could not have their parents married. I just thought this was wrong.” Well, now we know. The justice’s reasoning had nothing to do with Constitutional principles. He had an emotional reaction and in his hubris he imposed his private feelings on the nation....

As this is being written, Manuel Zelaya, the ousted and exiled ex-president of Honduras, is holed up in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, having been smuggled there on Sept. 21. His followers acted like the anti-capitalist protesters who haunt G-20 meetings, smashing windows, spraying graffiti, attacking police cars, and suchlike. Here is how we got to this point: Zelaya was elected president of Honduras in 2005. His administration has been plagued by charges of corruption, with the impartial group, Transparency International, ranking Honduras under Zelaya as corrupt as Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Libya. In 2008, Zelaya joined the...

There should be very little legal controversy in the military's employment to defend the border against an unlawful incursion by foreign nationals. The defense of territory and persons is the primary responsibility of the Department of Defense. Other authorities also relevant specifically, the provisions under federal law as vested under Title 10, Chapter 13 of the U.S. code: That whenever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, he...

In the Claremont Review of Books, we have described our current political scene as a cold civil war. A cold civil war is better than a hot civil war, but it is not a good situation for a country to be in. Underlying our cold civil war is the fact that America is torn increasingly between two rival constitutions, two cultures, two ways of life. One vision is based on the original Constitution as amended. This is the Constitution grounded in the natural rights of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution written in 1787 and ratified in 1788. It has...

Conflicted: Because the presidents who nominate them are political, federal judges who are appointed to the bench are political as well, which is why our country gets so many rulings from that conflict — or appear to conflict — with U.S. law. We got another one on Monday: A federal judge in California, appointed to the bench by President Obama, ruled that POTUS Donald Trump has no authority to issue an executive order changing asylum rules that are clearly being abused by hordes of migrants. The Associated Press reported: …U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar agreed with legal groups that immediately...

A police chief in Washington says the state's new strict gun laws are violating the US Constitution. Chief Loren Culp has refused to enforce the new state gun control laws. Culp says neither he nor his department will be upholding Washington’s new Initiative 1639, arguing the gun control legislation directly violates the Second Amendment

The Department of Education has issued its long-awaited proposed regulations reforming sexual-assault adjudications on college campus. Not only will these rules restore basic due process and fairness to college tribunals, but they also — given how basic the changes are — highlight just how ridiculous university kangaroo courts have become. First and perhaps most important, the rules will not only require colleges to permit cross-examination of witnesses (including the accuser), but will also prohibit universities from relying on the statements of any witness who refuses to submit to cross-examination. Cross-examination is so fundamental to adversary proceedings that it’s is simply...

Of late I have been reading Ron Cernow's excellent biography of Alexander Hamilton. I have just finished the period in Hamilton's life of his service as the first Secretary of the Treasury and he leaving to go back to private life. He is visiting his friend George Washington Parke Curtis, President Washington's grandson, when he sees a small copy of the U.S. Constitution. He then says this about the Constitution: "So long as we are a young and virtuous people, this instrument will bind us together in mutual interests, mutual welfare, and mutual happiness. But when we become old and...

God has blessed We the People with the right man, in the right place, at the right time. He knows we have his six. Let's roll. Things are getting out of hand folks, and I don’t think you need to be especially perceptive to sense it. When will the Rubicon be crossed, the gauntlet thrown, and the point of no return reached? Some would say that we have already reached that point, reached that point and passed it. Activist judges increasingly feel free to “interpret” law according to their own personal biases, instead of using the US Constitution as their...

In liberals' imaginations, there are only four ways to lose elections -- and none has to do with their leftist turn, their hysterics or their one-dimensional identity politics. Democrats say they lose because of gerrymandering, voter suppression (sometimes known as asking for ID), Russian mind-control rays deployed by social media, and our antiquated and unfair Constitution. That last excuse is becoming increasingly popular among pundits who continue to invent new crises to freak out about. Take Vox's Ezra Klein, a longtime champion of direct democracy: "I don't think people are ready for the crisis that will follow if Democrats win...

Mark Levin took the time during his opening segment last night to frame the importance of the midterm election. President Trump will leave nothing on the battlefield; he is working, campaigning and fighting on our behalf. Now, with the election less than 24 hours away, it is time for us to stand and take action…